Seven ways to separate yourself from the competition

When your industry becomes a commodity, it is important to develop new ways to separate yourself from the competition. I champion what I call the Combination Code by asking what is your And? A number of the examples listed below employ this tactic.

Telling potential customers you have the best service, or you’ve been in business for 25 years or you offer the best prices rarely helps you gain traction in any industry. Add value to what you do, then you will earn what you are worth.

Find an interesting creative concept from another industry and apply it to your business. Look at other industries for creative ideas to add to our products and services.
Create a solution to the No. 1 complaint in your industry. We enjoy hearing all the words of encouragement about our creative work. Unfortunately, many of us ignore the complaints. Criticism is one of our best sources of material for new product and service ideas.
Develop a new presentation method. Presentation styles in every industry grow stale over time. Create a new way of sharing what you do to gain the attention of buyers.
Send a unique thank you card (just sending a thank you card may do it).
Combine a new skill with your core talent. Look around for related services that you can apply to your core service that will add value to what you do.
Collaborate with someone from another industry. It’s not uncommon for people with different talents and ideas to come together to create a new product or service.
Apply concepts from other cultures or different parts of the world to your business. As business owners we often do business the way our neighbors do business. Step away and look at how other cultures approach your craft or industry.

What have you done to separate yourself from the competition?

6 Responses to "Seven ways to separate yourself from the competition"

Steve Coleman says:

June 6, 2012 at 5:32 pm

Good post and thank you Rosh. At the risk to harping on a topic dear to my heart ( and its because I see so many photographers struggling ) … part of the answer to separating your self from your competition is to understand your brand and how leverage it. And I don’t mean your logo or the design of your web site, that’s not a brand. Here’s something I wrote a few years back for Livebooks and it might be of interest to readers who are really trying to separate themselves from their competition. Cheers, Steve

Does your Brand set you apart from the crowd?
http://blog.livebooks.com/2009/11/does-your-brand-set-you-apart-from-the-crowd/

Reply
1. Rosh says:
  
  June 6, 2012 at 5:48 pm
  
  Thanks for sharing the link.
  
  I 100% agree. Your brand is not your logo. But you better be good at branding and/or have something to offer beyond the average.
  
  Few people can make a living from promoting price or service. I believe branding can be just as hard for many.
  
  Thanks for your comment.
  
  Rosh
  
  Reply
2. Rosh says:
  
  June 6, 2012 at 6:12 pm
  
  I like the idea of your brand is a promise, but I tend to promote the idea that your brand is your reputation.
  
  Rosh
  
  Reply
Steve Coleman says:

June 10, 2012 at 11:29 am

Promise and reputation are very similar. The mindset for reputation is a bit different to promise; if your reputation is for wedding photography how can you leverage that if you want to diversify into other areas of photography. It can both hold you back and hold back potential new customers. One of the most important aspects of building your brand is to build into it attributes and values which give your brand room to grow and evolve.

Reputation can have its anchor point in the past.

I know, it all sounds a bit academic, and it is. However a deeper understanding of brands helps people build a better brand platform.

Reply
1. Rosh says:
  
  June 10, 2012 at 12:20 pm
  
  I agree they are similar. Well said. But, just to play mind games,
  
  The same could be said about promise. If you have to promise, that may mean you don’t have a reputation.
  
  You have to earn a reputation. I could promise that my brand represents the best wedding photography ever without having once photographed a wedding.
  
  My logo (which is not my brand) represents the promise earned by my reputation. A solid reputation gives you the foundation to further develop your brand where ever you want to take it.
  
  Social media makes ones reputation all the more important. You have to stay on top of your game.
  
  Rosh
  
  Reply
  1. Steve Coleman says:
    
    June 10, 2012 at 7:00 pm
    
    Always difficult to have these kinds of conversation in this format. Can get complex, even for the most simple of concepts…. but its fun
    
    A brands promise has nothing to do with what we as brand owners, might promise our customers. Thats what everything thinks it is, but it not. Brand owners always promise things that are either not credible, unrealistic or not in balance with reality…. often they promise things out of thin air without any thought, based on what they think they are or believe they can be. We are often poor judges of what our brand is really like.
    
    Another way to express this is that building a reputation is very important, but where do you build it and how. One needs to build a brand platform first based around some credible needs in the marketplace. Only then can you build a good and correctly constructed reputation. Misunderstand your brand, and as hard as you might work, your reputation will be poorly built, or even worse, built in completely the wrong way.
    
    To understand the brands promise one needs to look through the other end of the telescope. A brands promise is what your customers and potential customers have as an expectation of what your brand will deliver to them. Its your customers and potential customers who actually ‘own’ your brand. They decide what’s real and whats important. A brand is driven by their needs and meeting those needs, and your promise ( as a brand owner would view it) needs to be define, expressed and deliver based on those needs.
    
    Yes you do have to earn a reputation. But the reputation needs to be made and worked at, based on something which is defined, like goal posts… where do u kick the ball? Understanding what is your brand promise as defined by you customers and potential customers is very important in knowing where and how to kick the ball.
    
    It way I define a brand based around some element that is as simple and as early in the process as possible; so as to help people understand where they might need to start in looking at their brand, reputation and everything else.
    
    As for logos, they are not that important. Yes you need an identifying brand mark but they are not where the effort needs to be put. Apple Inc would still be as successful if it were an orange. It’s brand promise lies elsewhere and its done a great job of building its reputation around that promise. Now that Steve Jobs has gone it will be interesting to see if it can maintain its reputation by continuing to deliver on the promise we expect. If it tries to go forth trying to maintain its reputation it will fail. Many brands get so fixated on their reputation that they miss why it was there in the first place e.g. Polaroid was a good example, and now we have HP who are missing the point.
    
    Hope I have not bored you Rosh, im passionate about brands as u can see
    
    PS, my spelling is shocking and i typed this fast so hope its ok?
    
    Reply

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